Critters and Lag

[suicide commando]

Something I noticed recently, which has been annoying me quite a bit, is when the game starts to get laggy, due to all the stuff going on etc.
Critter behaviour seems to go out the window, suffering even more than the rest of the game.
When wrangled or attacked in the wild, they will continue to walk around for a good while before popping or becoming trussed and ready to be shipped.
In ranches, it takes ages for them to respond and go to the grooming station, or to the critter drop off point. When I looked at it, my rancher took almost an entire cycle to groom 4 glossy drecko's. And it wasn't the grooming that took most of that time. It was the whistling at the grooming station that took forever, as the critters just idled in the pen even though they weren't groomed while my rancher kept calling for them.

Does anybody have any tips on how to avoid this behaviour of the game?

[thorstein92]

I think that is "optimalisation".

Critter AI has lower priority than Dupes AI. So when mayor lag hits critter movement is updated less frequent.

Depending how severe lag is - either set lower speed game, or combat against pathfinding lag.

[Sasza22]

This needs some attention. Even without much lag (45 fps) critters walk up to 4 tiles away when being wrangled and the dupe can walk like 10 tiles before the critter changes state to wrangled. Same can happen when the critter turns from baby to mature form. Sometimes it takes a few seconds for it to play the proper animation.

When the lag gets worse critters sometimes completely forget to do anything.

[nakomaru]

You can avoid this behavior by exterminating critters.